Deputy Principal Mission and Pastoral Care

Be a Voice for the Generations

The occasion and theme for National Reconciliation Week has played out in numerous ways in Veritas Voice this week. This is not a case of repetition but an indication of how this week of solidarity and action has been a focus across our entire College over the past week. In our Catholic Dominican community engagement with Reconciliation is an issue of faith in practice.

The Bible is full of references to reconciliation. In Acts of the Apostles Chapter 3 it states ‘Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord’. The Bible acknowledges that in our world there is a sense of things that need to be reconciled and corrected. Reconciliation is about justice, it is about acknowledging the errors of the past and it is about working together towards a more unified Australia.

In order for that ultimate reconciliation to come about we need to understand that it requires that we are open-minded and selfless. This is the case in fact for any act of true and meaningful justice. Reconciliation cannot be one-sided. And it can’t just be seen as something that you have to do. It’s got to be something that we want to do because we know the ultimate reward that’s going to come in the end. It requires faith that reconciliation is not just going to be good for us individually, but good for the whole. True reconciliation is informed and genuine.

To this end, our Years 5-12 Reconciliation Assembly this week engaged in a creative, intelligent and uplifting manner with these components of Reconciliation and with the Voice To Parliament in particular. In our prayer and reflection we noted that the Catholic Social Teaching principle of subsidiarity holds that all people have a right to participate in decisions made about their lives and that decisions should be made by those closest to, and most affected by, the outcome. This understanding allows us as a Catholic community to understand why Catholics around Australia are in support of the Voice to Parliament being enshrined in our constitution. 

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference issues a statement arguing that First Nations Peoples have lived in Australia for many thousands of years but their custodianship of the land isn’t mentioned in the Constitution and this is ‘an omission which needs to be rectified’. They state that A Voice to Parliament isn’t the only way to achieve that outcome, but it ‘is the way requested by those who gathered at the historic meeting at Uluru’. ‘This could be a significant step towards a more just and equitable Australia,’ the statement says. The bishops call for a meaningful debate on the issue, acknowledging that ‘people may, in good faith, have differing concerns and perspectives…We are an open democracy, and this is a moment to use our democratic institutions to produce a high-quality debate shaped by a genuine concern to do justice and bring healing to First Nations Peoples,’ they wrote.

As you listen to your children talk about what they are hearing and learning about in terms of Indigenous Reconciliation and the Voice to Parliament this week, it is important to note that we are not taking a stance in these areas because we are partisan but because we are Christian. 

Melanie van der Meer
Deputy Principal Mission and Pastoral Care